Colorado Hockey Now Paywall: How to Read CHN+ Articles for Free

Colorado Hockey Now is an independent site covering the Colorado Avalanche. It belongs to the National Hockey Now network of team sites, which also covers Pittsburgh, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, San Jose and other NHL markets, each with its own beat coverage. Its daily news, injury updates and line changes are open, as far as we can tell, but its best material, above all the "10 Takeaways" columns that Aarif Deen writes after every game, is reserved for CHN+ subscribers and marked with a "(+)" at the end of the headline. Avalanche fans who follow a link the morning after a game meet the subscription box. This guide explains how the CHN+ paywall works and how to read a full premium column.

How the Colorado Hockey Now paywall works

CHN+ is a subscriber-only tier, not a meter. Premium pieces are marked (+) in the headline and are closed to non-subscribers from the first read, so a private window does not help. Everything else on the site is open.

The gate runs in the browser. Colorado Hockey Now is a WordPress site, and its subscriber-only articles are hidden by a membership plugin that checks for a logged-in subscriber and hides the body of the article if it does not find one. The text is still delivered with the page, which is how search engines index it. A reader that fetches the page text without running the plugin's script receives the whole column. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out why that distinction matters, and CHN+ is on the softer side of it.

CHN+ costs $4.49 a month or $39.99 a year, which the site shows as a 26% saving, with a 7-day free trial. It removes ads, opens all subscriber-only articles and videos, and the same subscription also unlocks the premium content on the other Hockey Now sites.

Our tests on 25 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• An 858-word Colorado Hockey Now (+) column by Aarif Deen, 10 Takeaways on Nazem Kadri delivering on his promise against Tampa Bay, loaded in full, all 23 paragraphs.
• A 940-word Colorado Hockey Now (+) column by Aarif Deen, 10 Takeaways on another dominating night for the Avalanche offense, loaded in full, all 19 paragraphs.
• A 1,266-word Colorado Hockey Now (+) column by Aarif Deen, 10 Takeaways on the Avalanche power play showing signs of life, loaded in full, all 32 paragraphs.

Read a Colorado Hockey Now article in full

• Copy the article link. Colorado Hockey Now links look like coloradohockeynow.com/ followed by a headline slug, such as coloradohockeynow.com/10-takeaways-... for the game columns, and the (+) in the headline tells you the piece is premium.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The column appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and full text.

The reader fetches the page text as the site delivers it. If a page ever carried only a teaser, the reader would show a notice that only a preview was available, but every (+) column in our tests arrived in full.

Other approaches

• The free trial. CHN+ comes with a 7-day free trial, which covers a playoff series or a busy week of trade talk without paying anything.
• The free stories. Most of the site's news coverage is open, as far as we can tell, and a premium (+) column is usually accompanied by free reporting on the same game.
• The network. One CHN+ subscription unlocks the other Hockey Now sites, so if you follow a second team the price covers both.
• Other free sources. NHL.com and the Avalanche's own site publish box scores, line-ups, injury reports and press conference video free, and the raw material of most 10 Takeaways columns is in there.

How it compares with other sports sites

Colorado Hockey Now behaves like the other subscriber-funded sports sites we have tested. Defector, the writer-owned site with a subscriber paywall, loads in full, and so does the trade paper Sports Business Journal. The Athletic, the biggest subscription sports site and the one most Avalanche fans compare CHN+ with, blocks automated requests and does not work. Our hub on sites that cannot be bypassed explains what to do when a site blocks the reader, and the full list of sites that work is kept current.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

Colorado Hockey Now is a small independent operation, and the 10 Takeaways columns are the work of one reporter watching every game. If you read them after every Avalanche game, CHN+ at $4.49 a month, or $39.99 a year, is cheap for what it covers, and the subscription is what keeps the site going.